Middle Eastern Realities

Sheriff Dupnik Must Resign

Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, an elected leader entrusted with preserving the
rights of the innocent regardless of party affiliation, has made it clear he is
unable to carry out his duties in an unbiased manner. Nor is this the first
time he has shown himself unable to set politics aside in the performance of his
duty. When Arizona passed the bill dealing with illegal immigration, he refused
to enforce the law.

Now he has claimed that the vitriol of political discourse from
conservatives on radio and television and from the Tea Party led to nineteen
people being shot and six of them murdered. He called his own home state of
Arizona a “Mecca of bigotry and hatred.” Other Democrats are echoing the
slander, claiming that the Tea Party, Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh,
and all conservatives are responsible for the deaths of our fellow Americans in
Tucson.

Dupnik should apologize and resign for his incendiary and biased comments.
Given the spotlight, he could not bring himself to behave like a professional
law enforcement officer and stick with the facts. He used his fifteen minutes
of fame to lash out at political opponents by calling them bigots, racists, and
inciters of violence, lumping in the entire state of Arizona. He failed to
acknowledge that the only violence at a Tea Party event was perpetrated by
Democrat Teamster thugs against a black Tea Party activist. As a black
American, I think those who throw around the labels of “bigot,” “racist,” and
“hater” are guilty of the very thing of which they accuse others, and they do
our country a great disservice.

Dupnik and those on the left have used this as an opportunity to smear
law-abiding citizens across the country while overlooking the calling cards of a
disturbed man. It is clear that Jared Loughner, in his demented condition,
rejected God and all moral absolutes. There was the discovery of his backyard
shrine — containing a skull with burnt oranges — and reports that his favorite
books included The Communist Manifesto and Mein Kampf. This
is all anti-Christian behavior. Should we blame liberals and the ACLU for
creating an atmosphere of hostility to Christianity, Judeo-Christian, values and
the God of the Bible?

If there is a lesson to be learned from this mass murder, it is that we
must stop romanticizing and minimizing the risks of mental illness. We need to
get help for people who are a danger to themselves and others, not shut down
vigorous political discourse in our country. Liberals can make the process of
debate much less bitter by sticking to the issues rather than calling people
names. A good start would be for Democrats to ask Sheriff Dupnik to resign and
go home to take a long look in the mirror. Then maybe his Democrat colleagues
will do the same.

My prayers go out to the families and friends of Federal Judge John Roll,
Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, and all those involved in the senseless
shooting at her event. There is no place in our society for violent attacks of
any kind, especially against those who selflessly choose to serve in public
office. Our nation prides itself on civility. May God bring strength to them
and their families, and to our entire nation.

God bless the heroic Americans who intervened in this tragic event. No one
stopped to ask, “Are you conservative, liberal, heterosexual, homosexual, black,
or white?” Americans stepped in and helped each other. That is who we are.
The actions of one deranged individual should not be exploited to advance the
liberals’ political obsession with silencing their opponents.

We should view the aftermath of this horrific event as another
demonstration of the greatness of our country. Real Americans do not ask how a
crisis can be used for political gain. We act in unity and common concern for
each other without regard to race, gender, or politics. We respond to crisis by
rising to the occasion, not lowering ourselves to using innocent victims as
pawns in a political game. The attack on conservatives and the Tea Party, or
the attempt to associate this unbalanced individual with them, is irresponsible
and beneath contempt.

The double standard of the left is despicable and intolerable. While the
entertainment industry makes billions selling violent movies, lyrics, and video
games, liberals consistently argue that these expressions are not to blame for
any crimes or self-destructive behavior. “Leave these ‘artists’ alone,” they
cry. However, because they think they can further their political agenda, they
enthusiastically claim that an act by one deranged individual was caused by the
“tone” of conservative rhetoric heard in the media. No reasonable person would
conclude that free speech should be illegal because some deranged person might
be incited to violence.

E.W. Jackson is
President of STAND —
Staying True to America’s National Destiny — a national organization dedicated
to restoring America’s Judeo-Christian history and values and bringing people
together across racial and cultural lines as one nation under
God.

Since my last post concerning Jared Loughner and his past encounters with law enforcement, it appears that many people want and demand that my source for the information I posted be disclosed.

First and foremost, I struggled with ever writing the post I wrote. I had to source the puzzle pieces and vet the information with people who assured me they had first hand information regarding Jared Loughner. I wanted documentation. Unfortunately the mere possesion of the documentation would be a violation of HIPPA laws and the track back would be detrimental to the livelyhoods and lives of the people involved.

Anyone in Law Enforcement or Mental Health in Pima County that ever had contact with Mr. Loughner is now in bunker mode. Everyone is afraid of lawsuits down the road. They are evaluating their behavior and checking to make sure they followed all rules governing the care of Jared Loughner.

Lawfully some of the people that had knowledge of Mr Loughner could never come forward without subpoena by a lawful authority. Others are just too afraid.

It is my sincere hope that transparency in the investigation will prevail. We are dealing with very big issues that will affect the prosecution and defense of Loughner.

That is the only thing that should be of concern to law enforcement at the moment.

The Left, Not the Right, Owns Political Violence

It took less than 24 hours for the political Left to seize upon the attempted assassination of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and the murder of six people on Saturday to blame the political Right for the shooting.

Perhaps the most egregious example came from Paul Krugman of the New York Times, who wrote “We don’t have proof yet that this was political, but the odds are that it was.” (The newspaper that published plagiarized and fabricated accounts of the “D.C. sniper” by affirmative-action hire Jayson Blair in 2003 is still publishing unsubstantiated suppositions without “proof,” eh?)

“[Giffords’] father says that ‘the whole Tea Party’ was her enemy…” continued Krugman, “And yes, she was on Sarah Palin’s infamous ‘crosshairs’ list.” As if that was not enough, Krugman went on to invoke the specter of Tim McVeigh.

Well, we do have some proof now, and it’s clear that the shooter was in no way connected to the Tea Party, the Republican Party, or any other movement on the political Right. Law enforcement officials have revealed that suspect Jared Loughner was rejected by the Army, kicked out of college, appeared to have mental-health issues, and was a reader of the “Communist Manifesto.”

But since Krugman and the other members of the Leftist chattering classes have brought up the subject of politically-inspired violence, maybe we ought to remind them of the Left’s protracted association with political violence.

We could begin over a century ago when William McKinley was shot by Leon Czolgosz. Czolgosz was inspired by anarchist Emma Goldman (today a darling of the academic feminists). Goldman’s lover, Alexander Berkman, attempted to assassinate Henry Clay Frick because Frick was a prominent capitalist.

But it wasn’t until the 1960s (when Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, and Ho Chi Minh became idols of the American Left) that the Left really ramped up the violence. Who can forget Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam? Or Eldridge “rape is an insurrectionary act” Cleaver and his Black Panthers? What about the bombings perpetrated by the Weathermen? Former Weatherman bomber Bill Ayers is, of course, a close associate of President Barack Obama. Ayers managed to escape prosecution (and proclaimed himself “Guilty as hell, free as a bird”) but his wife Bernadine Dohrn served jail time for her part in the violence. Black radicals seized Cornell University at gunpoint in 1969, the same year the SDS and the Weathermen staged the “Days of Rage” riots. Race riots took place in Watts in 1965 and nationwide in 1968; leftists rioted at the Democratic Party Convention in Chicago in 1968. John Kennedy was murdered by a communist, and Robert Kennedy was shot by a Palestinian – hardly men of the Right.

The 1970s weren’t much calmer. The Army Math Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison was bombed by Leftist radicals in 1970. Heiress Patty Hearst was kidnapped and took part in and a series of armed bank robberies by the left-wing Symbionese Liberation Army. The SLA inspired Sarah Jane Moore to try to assassinate Gerald Ford –less than three weeks after Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, a disciple of Charles Manson, tried to kill Ford also. And what about the shooting of FBI agents at Wounded Knee by the American Indian Movement in 1975?

Since we’re taking about violence against members of Congress, how can we possibly fail to mention the murder of Congressman Leo Ryan and the mass suicide of 900 people by the Leftist/Marxist Jonestown cult in 1978?

Does anyone recall that President Clinton pardoned members of the Marxist-Leninist inspired Puerto Rican terrorist group FALN? Clinton also pardoned left-wing radical Susan Rosenberg, who was imprisoned for her role in the murder of two police officers and a security guard in a robbery in 1981. She was offered a teaching job at Hamilton College, but public outcry forced her to decline the position.

More recently, we’ve seen anarchist and communist riots against the WTO in Seattle in 1999, and violent anti-Bush and anti-war protests. In 2007 Leftist playwrights in New York created a stage performance about killing president Bush.

The politics of the contemporary Left is absolutely intertwined with either tacit or overt support for violence. How dare the left-wing media attempt to pin the actions of a deranged individual in Tucson on the Right! To do so is nothing less than a calumny, a slander, and a blatant hypocrisy.

The Religious Left has discerned that Christianity and Judaism demand virtually open borders by the United States, if not by other nations. So naturally, many liberal church elites have quickly and angrily lashed out at Arizona’s new immigration law, ascribing to its backers the contempt that much of the Religious Left seems itself to have for many average Americans.

Arizona’s Episcopal Bishop Kirk Smith huffily declared: “Today is a sad day in the struggle to see all God’s people treated in a humane and compassionate manner.” And he tut-tutted: “It seems that for now the advocates of fear and hatred have won over those of charity and love. Arizona claims to be a Golden Rule State. We have not lived up to that claim.”

It’s doubtful that the Episcopal Church in Arizona has been very successful in broadening it’s WASPy flock to include many immigrants. Still, Bishop Kirk presumes to be their spokesman and moral leader on behalf of the Golden Rule: “We will continue to work as hard as we can to defeat this law and to work toward just and fair laws that protect the rights of all human beings. We all know that our immigration system is broken, but it cannot be fixed by scape-goating the most vulnerable of those among us.”

Not content to defer to the local bishop, the Episcopal Church’s lobby office in Washington, D.C. also irritably chimed in against the Arizona law, bemoaning that the “lack of fair and humane immigration reform opens the door to misguided and divisive state and local attempts to address immigration enforcement.” Of course, the Episcopal lobbyists want a national amnesty that would override state attempts at immigration enforcement: “We urge Congress to provide a solution to a broken immigration system that separates families, spreads fear and keeps millions living in the shadows. Every day, members of our congregations see the unacceptable consequences of our broken immigration system. We urge the Senate and House to enact bipartisan immigration reform that reunites families, protects the rights of all workers, and provides an opportunity for undocumented immigrants to earn legal status.”

Of course, like the rest of the Religious Left, the Episcopal lobbyists simplistically portray their open borders policy as “Christians…[who] are called to embrace the stranger and to find Christ in all who come to us in need.” And like the Religious Left, they assume that solutions to vast social problems can be solved by sweeping legislation. “With strong leadership in Congress, we are confident we can solve the broken immigration system. We encourage members of Congress to join faith leaders to stand up for immigration policies that renew the dignity and human rights of everyone.”

But what if the open borders and amnesty that the Religious Left typically advocates in fact do not “renew the dignity and human rights of everyone” and instead only create more social disruption whose chief victims are ultimately low income native born and immigrants who lack the economic privileges of most Religious Left elites, especially Episcopalians? In typical fashion, the Religious Left does not ponder unintended consequences and instead assumes that good intentions and political correctness are sufficient.

Evangelical Left Sojourners chief Jim Wallis wants evangelicals to follow the old Religious Left in distilling the Gospel down to the Left’s latest political demands and prejudices. “The law … is a social and racial sin, and should be denounced as such by people of faith and conscience across the nation,” Wallis intoned. “It is not just about Arizona, but about all of us, and about what kind of country we want to be. It is not only mean-spirited — it will be ineffective and will only serve to further divide communities in Arizona, making everyone more fearful and less safe.”

Arizona’s new crack down on illegal immigration may or may not have faults, but will it make lawful Arizonans “less safe? Security and effective law enforcement are not typical strong emphases for Wallis or the Religious Left generally. Instead, they often prefer name calling and charges of bigotry. “This legislation feels reactionary and hateful,” claims Church World Service chief John McCullough, who heads the National Council of Churches’ relief arm. “It is a clear representation of the politics of division and exclusion.”

Even more hyperbolic was National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference chief Samuel Rodriguez, who has also successfully pressed the National Association of Evangelicals to adopt a liberalized immigration agenda. “Today, Arizona stands as the state with the most xenophobic and nativist laws in the country,” he pronounced, almost as a curse. “We need a multi-ethnic firewall against the extremists in our nation who desire to separate us rather than bring us together. Shame on you Arizona Republicans and shame on you Senator John McCain for endorsing the legislation.”

Rodriguez claims to represent virtually all Hispanic evangelicals, and naïve Anglo evangelical churchmen obligingly accept his claims, not considering that many Hispanic and other legal immigrants also have concerns about law enforcement, security, and open borders’ impact on their own ability to advance economically. Instead, the Religious and Evangelical Left idealize immigration as merely a bumper sticker social justice issue dividing forces of light from bigoted forces of darkness. Contrary to their claims, the Almighty has not directly revealed His preferences for U.S. immigration policy. But traditional Christian and Jewish moral teachings about human nature and statecraft offer better guidance than the slapdash pseudo-thinking of the Arizona law’s seething religious critics.

Max Baucus is the Chair of the Senate Finance Committee, and the Democrat most responsible fo Obamacare’s final shape other than Nancy Pelosi.

In an unusual speech on the Senate floor moments ago, Max Baucus declares that the “healthcare bill” to be “an income shift, it is a shift, a leveling to help lower income middle income Americans.” Baucus continued, “[t]oo often, much of late, the last couple three years the mal-distribution of income in America is gone up way too much, the wealthy are getting way, way too wealthy, and the middle income class is left behind. Wages have not kept up with increased income of the highest income in America. This legislation will have the effect of addressing that mal-distribution of income in America.”

Baucus’ candor is appreciated, though the fact that he waited until the bill passed to announce the real agenda behind the massive tax hikes isn’t a profile in courage. And the seniors on fixed income who are about to lose Medicare Advantage would laugh at Baucus’ pseudo-populism.

When the Left writes its own history, the past gets rewritten to suit the needs of the present. This is why I wrote A Conservative History of the American Left, to conserve not only fascinating figures now forgotten but to retrieve from the memory hole all that the Left has tossed down it. What is the history of the American Left that leftists want you to forget?

10. Ayatollah Khomeini, Leftist Hero

Reflexive anti-Americanism initially moved the Left to embrace the Islamic Revolution in Iran. Mother Jones, for instance, in 1979 predicted that “if Khomeini or his followers take power” then “democratic reforms, freedom for political prisoners, an end to the astronomical waste of huge arms purchases, and a constitutional government” would follow. The Nation, Michel Foucault, and other pillars of the Left similarly projected their ideals upon Khomeini and company.

9. Manson Family Values

“I fell in love with Charlie Manson the first time I saw his cherub face and sparkling eyes on TV,” hippie guru Jerry Rubin professed. “His words and courage inspired us.” Weatherman hoisted “Charles Manson Power” banners, adopted a spread-fingered greeting to symbolize the fork with which the Manson murderers impaled a victim’s stomach, and even boasted a cell nicknamed “The Fork.” Weatherman matriarch Bernardine Dohrn infamously proclaimed: “Dig it: first they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, then they even shoved a fork into the victim’s stomach. Wild!”

8. Gay Activists Sue to Block AIDS Test

Today, homosexual activists blame Ronald Reagan and the clergy for the spread of AIDS. But in the mid-1980s, the National Gay Task Force and the Lambda Legal Defense, citing civil-liberties concerns, actually sued the federal government to stop the AIDS test. Thankfully, they lost and scores of lives have been saved as a result.

7. Murder Chic

The easiest way to become a hero on the Left is to kill another human being. John Brown, the Molly Maguires, the Haymarket Square Bombers, Joe Hill, Huey Newton, and Mumia Abu-Jamal—murderers all—have been venerated by the Left in song and on screen. The people they murdered are not even an afterthought.

6. Jonestown Kool-Aid

Before orchestrating the murder/suicides 900+ people in Guyana, Jim Jones was the darling of the San Francisco Left. Huey Newton, Angela Davis, and Willie Brown embraced a man who killed more blacks than the KKK. Democrats Rosalynn Carter, Walter Mondale, and Gerry Brown made campaign visits to the Peoples Temple’s “comrade leader.” The mayor of San Francisco even rewarded Jones for his activism by appointing him chairman of the city’s housing commission. “The temple was as much a left-wing political crusade as a church,” The Nation reported in 1978. Unfortunately, as the years progressed, more Americans gulped down the Left’s Kool-Aid that Jones was of the religious Right and not an atheist leftist.

5. Concentration Camps, American Style

A year before Hitler came to power in Germany, Margaret Sanger called for a vast system of concentration camps for the United States. The Planned Parenthood founder demanded “a stern and rigid policy of segregation or sterilization” for “dysgenic” Americans who “would be taught to work under competent instructors for the period of their entire lives.” The 1932 speech concluded that “fifteen or twenty millions of our population would then be organized into soldiers of defense—defending the unborn against their own disabilities.”

4. Heaven on Earth

American intellectuals looked upon the hell on earth that was post-revolutionary Russia and saw a heaven on earth. The New Republic credited the Russian Revolution with providing “the most democratic franchise yet devised in our world,” while The Nation found that “the franchise is more democratic in Russia than in England or in the United States.” Lincoln Steffens marveled after a visit to the Soviet Union, “The revolution in Russia is to establish the Kingdom of Heaven here on earth.”

3. Eugenics

Even before the progressive era when most states instituted eugenics laws, the American Left had agitated for state controls over procreation. John Humphrey Noyes’ Bible Communists lamented that freedom of marital choice “leaves mating to be determined by a general scramble, without attempt at scientific direction” and devised the first eugenic experiment in the U.S.—“stirpiculture”—that produced dozens of children and prevented hundreds more. In Looking Backward, Edward Bellamy dreamed of “race purification” to “preserve and transmit the better types of the race, and let the inferior types drop out.” Other proponents included Margaret Sanger, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, who famously decreed in Buck v. Bell, “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” State governments ultimately sterilized upwards of 60,000.

2. Assassinating Presidents

Three of the four presidential assassins have been left-wing radicals. Bible Communist Charles Guiteau murdered President Garfield, anarcho-communist Leon Czolgosz murdered President McKinley, and Soviet Communist Lee Harvey Oswald murdered John F. Kennedy. Rather than own that history, the Left has invented conspiracy theories that absolve leftists from responsibility.

1. Nazi-Soviet Pact

The Left switched from pacifists to warmongers overnight once the Nazi attack upon the Communists dissolved the Hitler-Stalin Pact. Communist Party USA chief Earl Browder, who had dubbed WWII “the second imperialist war” during the pact, so thoroughly switched course when the Nazis attacked the Communists that he embraced conscription (after his opposition to it led to jail in WWI), endorsed a ‘no-strike’ pledge for labor unions (after encouraging strikes to impede the war effort), and kicked out Japanese Americans from the CP (after ostensibly championing civil rights). The Hollywood Anti-Nazi League ceased operations during the pact. The Communists’ New Masses panned the anti-Nazi Watch on the Rhine when it appeared as a play during the pact only to praise it when it appeared as a movie when Hitler and Stalin were again enemies.

Established in 1976 by California-based activist Drummond Pike, the Tides Foundation was set up as a public charity that receives money from donors and then funnels it to the recipients of their choice. Because many of these recipient groups are quite radical, the donors often prefer not to have their names publicly linked with the donees. By letting the Tides Foundation, in effect, “launder” the money for them and pass it along to the intended beneficiaries, donors can avoid leaving a “paper trail.” Such contributions are called “donor-advised,” or donor-directed, funds.

Through this legal loophole, nonprofit entities can also create for-profit organizations and then funnel money to them through Tides — thereby circumventing the laws that bar nonprofits from directly funding their own for-profit enterprises. Pew Charitable Trusts, for instance, set up three for-profit media companies and then proceeded to fund them via donor-advised contributions to Tides, which (for an 8 percent management fee) in turn sent the money to the media companies.

If a donor wishes to give money to a particular cause but finds that there is no group in existence dedicated specifically to that issue, the Tides Foundation will, for a fee, create a group to meet that perceived need.

The Tides Foundation promotes a multitude of leftist social agendas, as evidenced by its assertion: “We strengthen community-based organizations and the progressive movement by providing an innovative and cost-effective framework for your philanthropy.” Among the crusades to which Tides contributes are: radical environmentalism; the “exclusion of humans from public and private wildlands”; the anti-war movement; anti-free trade campaigns; the banning of firearms ownership; abolition of the death penalty; the right to receive government-funded abortion-on-demand; and radical gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender advocacy.

Immediately after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, Tides formed a “9/11 Fund” to advocate a “peaceful national response.” Tides later replaced the 9/11 Fund with the “Democratic Justice Fund,” which was financed in large measure by the Open Society Institute of George Soros, who has donated more than $7 million to Tides over the years.

Tides and the organizations it supports interact closely with one another on a regular basis. For example, Drummond Pike sits on the Board of the Environmental Working Group along with David Fenton, founder of Fenton Communications.

The Tides Foundation is a member organization of the International Human Rights Funders Group, a network of more than six-dozen grantmakers dedicated to finaning leftwing groups and causes.

In 1979 the Tides Foundation created, with a $9 million seed grant, a separate but closely related entity called the Tides Center, also headed by Drummond Pike. The Tides Center functions as a legal firewall insulating the Tides Foundation from potential lawsuits filed by people whose livelihoods or well-being may be harmed by Foundation-funded projects. (These could be, for instance, farmers or loggers who are put out of business by Tides-backed environmentalist groups.) In theory the Foundation’s activities are restricted to fundraising and grant-making, while the Center focuses on managing projects and organizations; in practice, however, both entities do essentially the same thing.

One particularly notable donor to the Tides entities is Teresa Heinz Kerry, wife of Senator John Kerry. From 1994 to 2004, the Heinz Endowments, which Mrs. Kerry heads, gave the Tides Foundation and Center approximately $8.1 million in grants. Until February 2001, Mrs. Kerry also served as a trustee of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, which has given Tides numerous six-figure grants.

Surprisingly, the Tides Foundation and Tides Center also receive grants from the U.S. federal government. Between 1997 and 2001, these grants included the following: $395,219 from the Department of Interior; $3,350,431 from the Environmental Protection Agency; $3,487,040 from the Department of Housing and Urban Development; $208,878 from the Department of Agriculture; $39,550 from the Department of Energy; $93,500 from the Small Business Administration; $10,986 from the Department of Health and Human Services; and $84,520 from the Centers for Disease Control U.S. Agency for International Development.